Elegance is the first word that comes to my mind to describe the "Le Palais Trasparent".Julien Skrobek expands the paths of Radu Malfatti and Taku Sugimoto exploring time and structure by placing sinewaves and guitar notes that brake the very rich silences.Carefully constructed, "Le Palais Trasparent" creates absorbing spaces that produce calm and intelligently suspended tensions. Anti-Copyright
Don't let the fact that the words FREE SOFTWARE SERIES are four times as big as the name of the composer put you off; Le Palais Transparent is a bona fide composition by 28 year old Paris based Julien Skrobek, and the software itself (Audacity under Debian, if you're interested) is but a means to an end, not an end in itself. It's used simply to sequence the sounding events, which consist of dabs of Skrobek's own guitar playing, and a filtered and processed 12,000 Hz sinewave. More important is the dedication to überminimalist Radu Malfatti, whose music Skrobek analysed in detail prior to composing his three-movement work. "I took all the Malfatti records available and made transcriptions of everything: timing, tones and studied them," he explains. "I wanted to get his feeling of space and time." Mission accomplished - silence accounts for nearly 85 percent of the work's duration - but it would be wrong to see Skrobek as little more than a country priest in Pope Radu's church. Whereas MAlfatti's sounds are pale and unobtrusive, almost daring the listener to forget them as soon as they stop, Skrobek beautifully sculpted sinewaves and deftly placed Zen brushstrokes of guitar, reminiscent of Italia-period Taku Sugimoto, reveal a fine ear and a genuine fondness for intervals - at times unashamedly consonant ones - which resonate in the memory long after they've been swallowed up in blank digital silence. The work's title is also a nod to another master craftsman of poetic extremism, Morton Feldma,, whose Palais de Mari Skrobek, with commendable taste, also cites as an influence. DAN WARBURTON Sound Projector # 17 (UK) Julien Skrobek has made Le Palais Transparent (FREE SS 03). Guitars and sine waves were the primary sound sources for it, but they have been rendered using Audacity sound manipulation running under the Debian operating system. Three tracks across 46 minutes, and as most of the occupied time is pure silence, you don't get much bang for your buck on this one; but when the guitar sounds do appear for a few fleeting seconds, they are pretty awesome. Skrobek may fancy himself as upping the ante on the ever-decreasing guitar playing of Taku Sugimoto. A drawing of the transparent palace, made by Charlotte Thevenin, appears on the front cover, and its imperceptible nature is suggested by the presence of thin silver lines. A visitor to said palace might find themselves in the same trap as the hapless space traveller of `In The Walls of Eryx', that famous H. P. Lovecraft story about the glass maze. Skrobek's music, however, does not convey transparency so much as utter invisibility. He has dedicated this ultra-minimal statement to Radu Malfatti, the improvising trombonist who has worked with Mattin and whose radical, challenging views on modern music and its audience are still dividing free-thinking people everywhere.
Live Music Archive
Librivox Free Audio
Metropolitan Museum
Cleveland Museum of Art
Internet Arcade
Console Living Room
Open Library
American Libraries
TV News
Understanding 9/11
